The clock is ticking. Have you voted early? Are you ready for the midterm elections? Sabato’s Crystal Ball, an election forecasting report from the University Of Virginia’s Center for Politics, shifted 21 midterm races in Democrats’ favor on Tuesday.

With just a week to go until the election, CNN says the shifts reflect the battle that Republicans face in holding onto their majorities in the House and the Senate amid historical headwinds. Three Senate ratings—in North Carolina, Florida and South Carolina—all shifted in Democrats’ favor, though it’s still an uphill climb in the latter two states.

Republicans have a 23.3% chance of holding the Senate, according to Thomas Miller, a Northwestern data scientist whose Virtualtout.io model calibrates Kalshi and Polymarket prices across all 35 races. That's up two points from an all-time low of 21.3% over the weekend—and way down from 34.8% back in September.

The snapshot, which Miller laid out in Fortune, still has Democrats flipping five seats and turning a 53-47 Republican Senate into a 52-48 Democratic one. Still, Congress has a long to-do list either way, including funding the government past Dec. 11, passing emergency defense spending and potentially raising the debt ceiling.

Israel voted, and nobody won. Yet. Exit polls from the country’s broadcasters showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led bloc and the rival "Change Bloc” of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot both stranded well short of the 61 Knesset seats needed to form a government. Projections ranged from a dead 51-51 tie to a thin edge for one side or the other, with Likud still the largest single party. Both men claimed the night anyway.

Netanyahu told supporters his bloc had won a “great majority." Eisenkot declared victory outright. One tally had the gap at 50-53 while another had it at 51-51 or 52-50. The real story is turnout. It hit 77.7%, the highest in decades, and the two Arab-led parties took a record haul (reported variously as 17, 18 or 19 seats) which on paper makes them the kingmakers. On paper. Both main blocs spent the campaign promising they wouldn’t need them.

This was Israel’s first national vote since the 2023 Hamas attacks and the wars that followed. President Donald Trump put his thumb on the scale last week, endorsing Netanyahu and warning that without him the U.S. might not continue its campaign against Iran. The endorsement did not produce a majority. Now comes the grind. Absentee ballots (roughly 600,000 of them) push the count past election night, and sources differ on when the official results land, with one timeline pointing to Nov. 4.

Narcissists don’t just ignore your feelings, their brains appear to process the whole social scene differently. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland scanned dozens of people pulled from an online survey, selecting those scoring highest and lowest on confidence, entitlement and attention seeking, the markers of grandiose narcissism.

Inside the scanner, subjects watched an actor describe being admired, then snubbed, then hit with stinging feedback. Viewers low in narcissism showed brains that synced up in regions tied to reading social situations and cognitive empathy. The high scorers were less in sync with each other, suggesting they were tracking different details rather than simply tuning out, Nautilus reports. The team, publishing in Cerebral Cortex, ties the finding to Erving Goffman’s 1950s idea of “facework”—the quiet mutual deal to protect each other's public image.

But what’s still a bit mysterious … the paper doesn’t resolve which specific brain regions drive the effect, how high and low were drawn, or whether anyone has replicated it. Useful at a dinner party, but not exactly a diagnosis yet.